Unbelievable. This was so well done in every sense. Sean Penn, absolutely breathtaking. That man can act something fierce. It's flawless.
10/10
Film#92 - Milk, 2008, dir. Gus Van Sant
I could rave about this, but I'm sure everyone knows by now this is a great movie. Culturally significant, beautifully done, phenomenal acting. It has all the elements of a great movie.
9/10
Film#93 - Fast Times At Ridgemont High, 1982, dir. Amy Heckerling
Fairly disappointing, in many ways. Firstly, as I'm on a bit of a Sean Penn marathon, he was barely in this. He's first billed, but he has such a small role, maybe 10 minutes of screen time. Secondly, for 'fast times' this was surprisingly slow actually. I expected it to be, you know, fast paced. What was weird was seeing all these young actors who would eventually become some of the most respected in their craft in the world, namely Penn, Forest Whitaker, a small cameo by Nicolas Cage, Jennifer Jason Leigh. It's a star-studded cast of people who have yet to become stars. It felt like a failed version of The Breakfast Club both in style and content. I expected more from Cameron Crowe.
6/10
Film#94 - Hard 8, 1996, dir. Paul Thomas Anderson
For a first try, I guess this was okay. I'm definitely a fan of Paul Thomas Anderson, and this was, well, weird. I thought it felt like it should have been trimmed down significantly, and made part of an ensemble polyphonic film. John C. Reilly was very good, as I think he usually is (in his serious roles), but the others felt a little underdeveloped. The story seemed a bit dragged out, and probably could have been told in half the amount of time. Still, it had that Anderson feel and look, which I love, but it wasn't enough to make the movie.
6.5/10
Film#95 - Paris, Je T'aime, 2006, 21 directors
This had been hyped up a lot to me over the years, and some people just love it. I, on the other hand, did not. Some segments are great, that's without a doubt. Others just didn't speak to me. Some of the more absurd sequences broke the feeling the film was creating. In fact, I wouldn't even call this a complete film. It really is just a collection of shorts, obviously, but more so in the way they didn't always play well off of each other. In that sense, each short really has to be judged on it's own, and the number of really good ones just didn't match the number of mediocre ones. Plus I'm not a big fan of short films altogether. Maybe I'm just under the impression that if a story is worth being told, it's worth taking the time to tell it properly. Many of these seemed like the kind of story you might tell a friend when they asked how your day was. Nothing special, maybe some chance encounter or little thing that happened, and they have little meaning if you don't know the context. If you met someone for the first time, asked how they were as a kind of social formality and they told you a five minute story of meeting someone that day who spoke a different language to you and then gave you their number, you wouldn't really know what the point was. On the other side of things though, some of these gave a glimpse into that sort of thing that didn't necessarily need context. Some though, felt as if I'd rather just not have seen them at all.
6.5/10
